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When the Saudi embassy offered to take Nasser Alabdulaaly home, he’d already taken a job in a hospital in Lombardy, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy.
Dr. Alabdulaaly is a 28-year-old Saudi medical student at University of Pavia. He volunteered to work in the Maggiore Hospital of Lodi, seen in the footage on Wednesday, as soon as the pandemic spiralled out of control in the country.
“As a medical doctor, I think I’m obliged to pay back to the country that gave me the opportunity to study in Italy 10 years ago, so in my opinion it would be a shameful act to go back to Saudi Arabia at this moment, especially at that time, Saudi Arabia had zero case of coronavirus,” explains Alabdulaaly in an interview after his shift on Wednesday.
“I learned a lot, I’m happy that I learn, but at the same time I’m really sad for the victims and their families,” he adds.
With hospitals under unprecedented strain in Lombardy, medical school graduates were called to the frontline battle against the pandemic.
“Ten days ago we had so many deaths, so many cases, at that time I couldn’t even sleep like 30 minutes, it was very hard for me to sleep even a little bit,” recalls the doctor.
To date, Italy tallies more than 187,000 COVID-19 cases and 25,085 deaths related to the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
Video ID: 20200422-050
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